The Devil's Canyon chips Under the metal cap of a Devil's Canyon processor is the same 22-nm Haswell silicon that drives any other recent Intel Core i5/i7 CPUs. The differences are at the package level, and the biggest one is literally right under that cap: a new thermal interface material, or TIM, between the cap and the chip. Intel switched to a different thermal interface with its first 22-nm chips, and some folks blamed the new TIM for the Ivy Bridge chips' unwillingness to overclock as well as the 32-nm Sandy Bridge processors before them. They claimed the prior TIM arrangement, known as fluxless solder, transferred heat more efficiently. Devil's Canyon has switched to a third option, a "next-generation" polymer TIM known affectionately as NGPTIM. Its goal is to transfer heat more efficiently between the CPU and the cap above it—and thus to the cooling solution sandwiched on top of it all.